People can and have taken strong issue with the view, favored by Sam Harris and me, that free will as traditionally conceived is a complete illusion. Many people have responded with diverse versions of “compatibilism”—the view that determinism is still compatible with some notion of free will. (I happily note, though, that almost nobody questions determinism itself, though some have urged us to keep it quiet lest it rile up the hoi polloi).
And the discussion, which I think has been fantastic and instructive, has been almost completely free of invective or ad hominem arguments. That is, until last Monday, when science journalist John Horgan published a nasty and mean-spirited attack on Harris at Cross Check, his Scientific American blog. The post, “Will this post make Sam Harris change his mind about free will?“, is ugly and almost incoherent. Horgan starts off with a few punches to the solar plexus:
But Harris keeps intruding on my thoughts, in part because he keeps emailing me about his writings, and especially his new book Free Will (Free Press, 2012). Also, I admit to a certain voyeuristic fascination with Harris. I wonder, what crazy idea is he going to peddle next? Some of his righteous rants give me a perverse pleasure. I’m simultaneously irritated and titillated. I get the same feeling listening to Rush Limbaugh or Rick Santorum.
First of all, Sam did not “keep emailing” Horgan about his writings, a statement that implies that he’s beleaguering Horgan with unsolicited emails. In fact, as Sam has verified, Horgan signed up to receive Harris’s email announcements, which are almost always about Sam’s new posts. Horgan is in fact one of 45,000 people who get these announcements—voluntarily.
Although I try not to derive psychological motivations for rants like Horgan’s, he makes it easy because he gives them at the outset:
Harris’s new book rates orders of magnitude higher on Amazon’s Best Sellers lists than my new book, The End of War (McSweeney’s, 2012), which concludes with a chapter called “In Defense of Free Will.” That rankles.
Indeed, Horgan tried to get me to publicize his book (now #27,446 on Amazon), which seems to have a message of increasing peace on earth similar to that of Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature (#1,426), but for some reason I wasn’t motivated. Now I’m glad I wasn’t.
Insofar as Horgan tries to argue for free will, he fails. He says that he “loathes” the philosophy of determinism, and argues that “free will” (which he never defines) involves making real choices that are not determined but “constrained”:
Harris asks us to consider the case of a serial killer. “Imagine this murderer is discovered to have a brain tumor in the appropriate spot in his brain that could explain his violent impulses. That is obviously exculpatory. We view him as a victim of his biology, and our moral intuitions shift automatically. But I would argue that a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions, and if we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer’s brain, that would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it.”
Harris seems to be advancing a reductio ad absurdum, except that he wants us to accept the absurdum: there is no fundamental difference between me and a man compelled to kill by a brain tumor. Or between me and someone who can’t help washing his hands every 20 minutes, or someone who’s schizophrenic, or a babbling baby, or a newt, or a worm. I mean, if I’m not different from a guy who kills because a tumor provokes him into murderous rages, how am I different from anyone or anything with a brain, no matter how damaged or tiny?
Horgan’s mistake here is to assume that “normal” behavior is less physically determined than behavior mandated by obsessive-compulsive disorder or brain tumors that cause aggression. But even Whitman had a choice: he could presumably have controlled his murderous rages, and obsessive-compulsive disorder can sometimes be cured if the sufferer seeks help. In that sense there are still apparent (but not real) “choices”. But the real point is that all pf our behavior stems from our neurological conditions, be it Horgan having fries instead of chips or Whitman picking off students with a rifle in Austin. In that way there is no fundamental difference in the degree of determinism of our behavior. So how is Horgan different from Whitman?
Here’s the difference. The man with a tumor has no choice but to do what he does. I do have choices, which I make all the time. Yes, my choices are constrained, by the laws of physics, my genetic inheritance, upbringing and education, the social, cultural, political, and intellectual context of my existence. And as Harris keeps pointing out, I didn’t choose to be born into this universe, to my parents, in this nation, at this time. I don’t choose to grow old and die.
But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.
To me this is incoherent. “I do have choices, which I make all the time” says nothing different from what Whitman did, especially because Horgan avers that his choices are indeed “constrained” by things like the laws of physics. But what does he mean by “constrained”? Is there some real freedom beyond physics, genetics, and environment? Does “constrained” equal “determined”? If so, then Horgan is well and truly a determinist. If not, then he’s a dualist.
Indeed, I think Horgan is a dualist, perhaps conditioned by his “loathing” for determinism. Here’s a sign of the ghost in Horgan’s machine:
But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.
I find it amazing that a science writer can say this. Yes, there are emergent phenomena (like the “wetness” of water) not predictable from a more reductionist analysis, but those phenomena are indeed determined by lower-level phenomena, with the laws of physics at the bottom. Higher-level processes might also not be predictable by human endeavor (chaos theory is an example), but they are still a) deterministic (absent quantum phenomena) and b) must be consistent with lower-level phenomena. There is nothing we know about minds that implies that they’re not reducible to and determined by the physical processes in our brains. And, of course, nobody—including incompatibilists like Sam and me—denies that minds can be changed by environmental influences (like the words I’m writing now), or that those changed minds can change the world. Indeed, later on in his piece Horgan claims that if Harris had changed his mind and actions, that would be real evidence for free will. That’s balderdash. Both compatibilists and incompatibilists agree that minds can be changed.
In the end, I conclude that Horgan really is a dualist: he thinks there’s something to our minds beyond the physical structure of our brains. What finally convinced me is his penultimate paragraph:
We are physical creatures, but we are not just physical. We have free will because we are creatures of mind, meaning, ideas, not just matter. Harris perversely–willfully!–refuses to acknowledge this crushingly obvious and fundamental fact about us. He insists that because science cannot figure out the complex causality underpinning free will, it must be illusory. He is a throwback to the old behaviorists, who pretended that subjective, mental phenomena—because they are more difficult to observe and measure than planets and protons—don’t exist.
First, we consider free will illusory not because we can’t figure out how brains work to the tiniest neuron, but from both first principles (our brains are material and must obey physical laws) and the increasing evidence that our view of “agency” can be radically changed by neurological or psychological experiments.
And yes, we are just physical, for our mental phenomena—and that includes our so-called “choices,” and our “mind, meaning, and ideas”—are, and must be, the result of physical processes. Those mental phenomena can differ only if the underlying physical substrates differ. Yes, we can speak of “minds” and of “choices” as entities that are meaningful in human discourse, but in the end they all come down to neurons and molecules. And “free will”—at least the contracausal form conceived of by many, including millions of religious people—is indeed an illusion.
Oh, and in his last paragraph (remember, this is on Scientific American) Horgan can’t resist a completely gratuitous slap at Sam’s intellect:
Dwelling on Harris depresses me. All that brainpower and training dedicated to promulgating such bad ideas! He reminds me of one of the brightest students I’ve ever had, who was possessed by an adamant, unshakable belief in young-earth creationism. I did my best to change his mind, but I never succeeded. I probably won’t change the minds of Sam Harris and other hard-core determinists either, but it’s worth a shot.
Stay classy, John. Ten to one Sam will respond to you (if he does) without anything like the invective you’ve heaped on him.
